Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Lost soldiers: our abandoned POWs, another horror of war

When looking for links yesterday, I found ‘Our American Pravda’ at TAC. (By the way, rhetorical question: when will the New York Times give back its Pulitzer for spreading Red propaganda about the starvation campaign in the Ukraine?)

An even more egregious case followed a couple of years later, with regard to the stunning revelations of Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, one of America’s foremost Vietnam War reporters and a former top editor at the New York Times. After years of research, Schanberg published massive evidence demonstrating that the endlessly ridiculed claims of America’s Vietnam MIA movement of the 1970s and 1980s were correct: the Nixon administration had indeed deliberately abandoned many hundreds of American POWs in Vietnam at the close of the war, and our government afterward spent decades covering up this shameful crime. Schanberg’s charges were publicly confirmed by two former Republican House members, one of whom had independently co-authored a 500-page book on the subject, exhaustively documenting the POW evidence.

Although a major focus of Schanberg’s account was the central role that Sen. John McCain had played in leading the later cover-up, the national media ignored these detailed charges during McCain’s bitter 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama. One of America’s most distinguished living journalists published what was surely “the story of the century” and none of America’s newspapers took notice.

Recently I tried to write a balanced assessment of President Nixon. He really tried to do what was right so he governed non-ideologically, doing some liberal things if he thought they would work. Given that we were about to lose Vietnam, and he was doing what the people wanted by getting out (Nam was not a Republican war; he met the protesters face to face and tried to make things right), he wisely exploited the Sino-Soviet split by making peace with Red China, making sure the falling dominoes wouldn’t be a threat to us. (My revisionism about the war: we should have done so with imperial Japan and stayed out. Same conscience issue; similar atrocities.) And he was right about that. But to do so, he sacrificed South Vietnam and, in theory, Nationalist China (but maybe he knew Taiwan would be fine; as defense analyst Stuart Koehl explained to me, China can destroy Taiwan but not conquer it, so it’s left in peace)... and our own POWs? Those good kids from the old America who really wanted to fight global Communism/defend America, and weren’t like the spoiled rich kids getting draft deferments from going to school and partying on Daddy’s dime, or running away to Canada, or worse, waving the damn enemy’s flag? (I’m still not Fonda Hanoi Jane.) Betrayed. Maybe he justified it as war casualties for the greater good of national security. Sacrificing themselves is part of what soldiers do. But if this story is true*, my God, what have we done? The objective evil of war. (Which the left is silent about when they do it.)